Could this be the most reliable form of age verification yet?

I have some of my best ideas while lying in the bath. This one came about as a result of me thinking that if I wanted to start a “mature” MMORPG, how would I go about age verification in such a way that it was the most secure and policeable ever? I then attacked it with two criteria: How would I implement it, and if I was deliberately setting out to abuse it, how would I do so?

And then it came to me.

What I would do would be to make a deal with a telephone service company that provided specialist premium rate numbers. I’d tie my computer system to theirs in a similar but more extensive way that Ebay and Paypal use. The age verification routine on my website would give the person about to go through the check a unique identifying number. It would also feature prominently the warning “CALLING THE AGE VERIFICATION NUMBER WILL COST $5 PLUS APPLICABLE LONG DISTANCE CALL CHARGES. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS CHARGE, AND BY CALLING THE NUMBER AND PROCEEDING YOU ACCEPT LIABILITY FOR ALL CHARGES RESULTING FROM THIS CALL.”

Here’s the thing. The number it gave me to call and give my identification number that I’d just been given can ONLY be called from a domestic residential landline. It can’t be called from a mobile, and it can’t be called from a public callbox or a business landline. It can only be called from a domestic landline, which, correct me if I’m wrong requires the owner of the landline to be over the age of consent in their country.

So, I call the number, and I enter my code, and I’m age verified. I haven’t passed ANY identifying information that could be abused to any third party, and by verifying that I called from the number at that address, I do provide a method for legitimate law enforcement to track me down should that ever be necessary.

Now here’s the kick. I know you’re all thinking “How does that prevent my 12 year old calling the number?” Well, the answer is, it doesn’t. BUT, when the parent/owner of the bill gets their monthly telephone bill, ONE call costing at least $5 is going to stick out like a sore thumb. What happens if my 12 year old has done this? Here’s part two of my idea.

Say my underage son/daughter has done this, and I get my bill and find out someone made a call to “ age verification” which cost me $5. I contact my phone company, and ask who the hell this is? They do a check their end, and they say “Well, we can’t refund the money, but there IS an abuse line on their record for people who feel that they’ve been the victim of fraudulent use.” I call that number, and register my telephone number, then I go and ground my kid.

My kid throws an almighty sulk, and decides that while grounded they’ll play the mature game. They go to sign on – and their account has been banned. Raising a query about the number automatically results in an account ban for the misusing account. Furthermore, the telephone number is ALSO banned, so when (s)he goes to open a new account and tries to age verify again, the number won’t connect from that landline. Without it connecting, they can’t verify.

I’m not claiming this is foolproof. I don’t know any system that WOULD be foolproof and implementable across the globe. But as far as I know It’s the best I’ve seen to date… I would welcome feedback on this, and if anyone wants to knock the idea around a little, I think this is a firm foundation for a secure method of age verification that doesn’t require giving away potentially illegal information, it would work worldwide, it wouldn’t require very much in the way of equipment to make it work and I recommend this idea to the population!

Fancy a new viewer?

It hasn't taken long for the open source community to rip the Second Life viewer to bits and learn how to modify or even delete the bits they don't want.

Nowhere is this more evident than the BDSM community. Marine Kelley's new viewer is a variant that works with scripts available for free from her shop, designed to compliment her existing range of, erm, toys. The viewer reacts to the scripts by removing items from the menus and pie menu that appear when you right click the avatar. It's aimed at "hardcore" BDSM players (though how you can be hardcore when it's your pixellated avatar that's getting the whipping, not you) who want that little bit more realism. Drop the script into a ballgag, and you can't speak through that ballgag on the open channel. Not 'can't speak by mistake', but viewer-enforced can't speak at all. Drop the script in a set of cuffs or other restraints, and the "detach from avatar" options all vanish. If you get locked in, you're locked in, and you can't get out from this viewer.

It's an interesting new development, certainly far from anything Phillip Rosendale ever dreamed, and I can see similar developments coming in the not too distant future. Just today the furry community was polling its membership about disabling scripting and building to anyone outside their group; the next logical development from that might be a viewer that has an identification string that an in-world item can ask for, and sends home anyone that doesn't have the FurLife Viewer. I can see it coming, and it wouldn't be too hard to do.

Of course, this makes a mockery of age verification, since viewers will be able to ignore parcel flags, which makes you wonder why Linden Labs are still talking to Integrity at all. More ominously groups might be able to use it to keep themselves underground and away from the prying eyes of law enforcement, but that's technology for you.

The pandora's box of Open Source Second Life has been opened. I wait with interest to see what it lets out!

If you're having problems with our system, check it's our fault before complaining

From the official Second Life Blog:

"We’ve received a recent rise in reports of inventory loss, including inventory resulting back to default, including your avatar. We’re actively investigating this and having already helped a number of Residents, we’re continuing to work on individual cases.

In order to help you better, as with bugs and issues in general, it’s important that if you think you’re affected, that you rule out other causes first."

The entry then goes on to blame everything else, such as if you're using a wi-fi connection or if you might have given items to someone else by mistake.

To me, the entire tone of the posting is disrespectful. The point of it seems to be an attempt to blame ANY other cause than the system. It's even technically misleading, since although wi-fi "hotspots" can indeed cause high packet loss if there's 100 users all sitting in a massive lounge (at an airport for example) surfing wirelessly at the same time, but a home user with two or three PCs linked to their wireless router is not ever going to experience the same degree of packet loss unless they have faulty equipment. I've got Sympatico High Speed Unplugged, what could be termed the ultimate in wifi (the modem doesn't even plug into a phone line) and yet I can still play SL without any issues. Also, many people who play SL play other online games as well, and if they had an important issue such as high packet loss, the other games would be unplayable. In all the cases I've heard of, or spoken to people about, this hasn't been the case.

Inventory loss means the item has gone. If you give it to someone else, you receive notification "Unfortunate Victim has accepted your inventory offer." If you get it returned, you receive a notification "Your item 'Linden Prayer T-Shirt' has been returned to your lost and found folder from plot testbed due to auto return rules" - people complain of inventory loss when they log on, open their inventory and half of it is missing.

In an attempt to aid Linden Labs in their diagnosing, here would be my checklist:

Have you just logged on? If you've just logged on, and half of your inventory isn't appearing, then you may have inventory loss. If you get it during a session keep an eye out for server messages in your chat log. A server message such as "Can't find " may indicate it's the by now infamous asset server that's creaking under the pressure yet again.

Have you cleared your cache? This is actually not a bad idea, since SL doesn't seem to know some of the time what to do with its cache, and in any case it crashes so often it frequently doesn't clean up what it was doing in a previous session, and this can lead to problems.

Is there an obvious message in your chat log to explain your loss? Such as the ones I've detailed above. Yes, it is also possible to drop entire folders into objects, but it's uncommon since a lot of inventory loss doesn't occur at home, and involves packaged items rather than folders. I would also say here that to drop ONE folder into an item by mistake is unusual. To drop SEVERAL folders into items is so unusual as to be not worth considering. People complain of inventory loss when they have no idea what happened to folders, they don't generally complain of it when they were using that folder a moment ago.

In your inventory's 'Recent Items' tab, do the items appear there? This means you were using them, and can clear up if you've dropped them into items. If it doesn't appear here, you haven't been using these items recently.

As for "search the knowledge base" - well, that's a laughable attempt to sidestep responsibility. If someone's got a problem and they HAVE caused it themselves and not realised it... trust me, they are NOT going to know enough about the situation to be able to find answers in the knowledge base, and those that know how the system works will already know whether or not the knowledge base can help.

I've often wondered why, if items are "ours", they're all kept serverside. If we've created an item surely the details of that item should be stored locally, on our own system, and uploaded to Linden Labs only as required? Looking at my inventory I've already got over 3000 items; people whose accounts are older may have tens of thousands of items. Is it not putting LL's asset server under too much pressure to have to store ALL of these serverside? Especially if a lot of them are attachments. Why must these things all be serverside, and prone to vanishing if a server hiccups?

Linden Labs, surely it should signify a problem if SUDDENLY there's been a rise in inventory loss complaints. Yes, there'll always be a level of complaints, from people who haven't actually lost anything... but if for several days you have 100 complaints and the next day you have 1000, then there's obviously something gone wrong or those 900 other people would be complaining on the other days too. It would be helpful - and respectful - if you made sure your own house was in order before trying to blame everyone and everything else!

An exercise in miracles

Talking to people in world about the crash it becomes clear to me that people don't really understand how much of a miracle Second Life actually is.

A common thing I'm finding is that people are comparing SL (unfavourably) with other programs like World of Warcraft. The reasoning generally runs that SL claims to have 2 million subscribers, of which up to 20,000 (a new milestone claimed today) are online at any one time, whereas WoW has 6.9 million subscribers, and is reckoned to have between 90,000 and 150,000 online at any one time. The general argument is that if WoW can do it, why can't SL? What are Linden Labs doing with all our money that they can't guarantee stability on a level with Blizzard?

Well, the major difference between the two systems is the content. In World of Warcraft, the game world sits on your hard drive. It doesn't change in-game. You can even download programs that will allow you to experience the gameworld without ever going online. Here is where the approaches tell - World of Warcraft only needs to exchange data with the server about what is in the characters immediate vicinity, and what it's doing. This is further limited in required scope by the fact that all the models for all the monsters etc are also stored on the customers own hard drive. All the server has to say is "There's a level 30 murloch standing 20 feet north of you" and the client computer knows what a murloch is and what it looks like, and drops the model into the game world at the requested location for the player to interact with.

Second Life, on the other hand, is completely different. All the viewer has is basic terrain textures that are stored locally. EVERYTHING else has to come from the server. In our example, say someone created a murloch (for arguments sake) in Second Life and it was standing 20 feet north of the player - well, the players computer would NOT know what a murloch is or was, wouldn't know how it was textured, what size it was, what it looked like, how it moved... all this data has to be sent from the Second Life server, rapidly interpreted on the fly by the client computer and then rendered in game. Even a simple shape like a cube has to be described sizewise, how far off the "ground" it is, what sides the client can see and what textures are on those sides. Until the client receives every single scrap of information, it renders the cube as a grey item.

When you consider all this, it's a miracle Second Life works as well as it does, particularly when you factor in that Linden Labs have created this environment you can "live" in completely from scratch. This approach is ALWAYS going to be slower than having the complete gameworld downloaded from a DVD on your local system, but makes for unrivalled flexibility in how the resident can interact with the world.

So yes. Second Life does have it's problems. Try and put too much load on it and it starts creaking at the seams. Put much more load on it and it does - still - collapse. But don't forget this is pioneering technology. Nobody has done this before (successfully - some have tried and failed).

In closing, I'd add that I recon I know where a lot of the subscription money goes - on Bandwidth. Imagine describing EVERY single detail of a virtual world to sixteen thousand people simultaneously. That's a LOT of bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money. Most of the money Linden Labs get likely goes to paying for the huge amount of bandwidth they use piping all that data to you.

So sometimes it won't work. Sometimes it will fall flat. When it does, we should not be lining Lindens up against the wall, we should remind ourselves that without their pioneering work in creating Second Life from the ground upwards (literally) that addictive world we all love (to hate) wouldn't exist in the first place.

Stay safe.